“Employees physically leave the office, but they do not leave their work. They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash — like a dog,” Benoit Hamon told the BBC. And the French, by the way, are tired of living like animals.

Hamon, a socialist member of the French parliament, was among those who passed a law last week that would give employees “the right to disconnect.” From now on, companies with more than 50 employees will have to allow workers to go home in the evenings or on weekends without having to check in electronically. As Hamon notes, “The texts, the messages, the e-mails — they colonize the life of the individual to the point where he or she eventually breaks down.”

Finding some time away from the constant buzz of work, a balance between career and personal life — who could object? According to a 2015 survey commissioned by Adobe Systems, workers estimated that they spend 3.2 hours devoted to work e-mails. Before going to work in the morning and before going to bed at night, even when they are on vacation, employees cannot get off of their devices. And it’s taking its toll on their emotional health. A study by psychologists at the University of British Columbia found that workers who checked e-mail throughout the day were significantly more stressed than those who only checked three times per day.

Some economists even suggest that the slowdown in the productivity of US workers has actually coincided with the rise of e-mails. People seem more busy, but what are they actually getting accomplished? A 2008 study by scholars at Ghent University found that task-switching like the kind we do when we stop working on a project in order to check e-mail reduces our working memory, which makes us less efficient in the tasks we are supposed to be doing. Scholars at the University of California found that it takes us an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back on task after being distracted. In some cases they found that workers who expected to receive a lot of e-mails during the day worked faster. But working faster also contributed to making more mistakes.

‘For bad managers, life is a constant emergency — but I’m not sure any government can solve that problem.’

The intention of French lawmakers is not the issue. They want to make life better for workers. But like the French 35-hour workweek, says Bernard Vivier, who runs the Higher Institute of Work, this law is going to create as many problems as it will solve.“Of course your boss shouldn’t send you e-mails on a Sunday when you’re at lunch, enjoying a leg of lamb and a good Bordeaux,” he joked on NPR. “It’s so French to throw a law at every kind of problem.”

French companies that want to do business internationally will have trouble working with people in other time zones. Not every work issue is urgent, but some are, and clients will become annoyed if their needs are not addressed in a timely fashion.

There is no doubt that our superiors do expect immediate responses to their messages. Laura Vanderkam, who studies ways that people can use time better, says that the French law “is a heavy-handed attempt to solve what is actually a management problem.” She notes that “constantly checking e-mail is an inefficient way to work. [But] there are legitimate reasons to be on e-mail after hours.”

Vanderkam, author of “I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time,” says that close to half the women she studied worked a “split shift” where they log off in the afternoon and then go back on at night after the kids are asleep.

She notes that “good managers . . . work out expectations with teams and also promote group coverage. Each person might be ‘on’ one night per week for client emergencies, so everyone else gets assured time off.”

“For bad managers, life is a constant emergency — but I’m not sure any government can solve that problem,” Vanderkam says.

Solutions will more likely be technological than legal. Some organizations have fought back against the scourge of e-mail by forcing employees to use Dropbox or other programs where workers can contribute to shared projects when they are ready rather than being pinged constantly throughout the day.

It is worth noting, though, that e-mail pressure is not entirely the fault of our bosses. Respondents to the Adobe Systems survey also devoted 3.1 hours to personal messages a day. And since you never know what kind of e-mail is going to come in, the fact that we are checking constantly may be the fault of our children or spouses or friends. Stay-at-home moms on playgrounds can’t stop checking e-mail either.

If companies want more productive workers, they will find ways to get them to spend more time working and less time e-mailing. But, with so much time devoted to personal e-mails, we may need to stop blaming our bosses for our problems and start looking in the mirror.